The Tibetan boy was looking staright at my camera without saying a word

At some point the boy drifted over to me and stopped directly in front of my feet. He did not run away, nor did he try to charm me with a smile. He simply stood there. Walking through towns in Nepal, I sometimes encounter this kind of distance, or rather, this lack of it. Compared with the local Nepali people, the boy’s features looked distinctly East Asian. The shape of his face and his eyes would not have stood out much in Japan. On that basis alone, I casually guessed that he might be Tibetan.

Kathmandu is home to many Tibetan refugees and their descendants, people who crossed the Himalayas from the Chinese side after the 1950s. Given that history, seeing Tibetans here is no longer unusual. In certain corners of the city, Tibetan Buddhist temples stand quietly, and small eateries smell faintly of butter tea. They rarely make it into guidebooks, but these layers of everyday life give the city its depth. Perhaps this boy’s parents or grandparents once arrived here from beyond the mountains. Of course, I never asked him, so it remains nothing more than speculation.

In truth, I had no way of knowing whether he was Tibetan at all. The only thing I could be sure of was the direction of his curiosity. Without saying a word, the boy stared intently at my SLR camera. His gaze seemed to probe the inside of the lens, as if trying to discover what lay beyond it. He barely blinked. After a while, it was I who began to feel self-conscious, unsettled by the quiet intensity of being so thoroughly observed..